Flash - Saviour of the Universe

I've always been a big fan of flashcards but I've been turned on to them in a big way recently. Like many people from my home town of Abertillery, I've been learning the Welsh language all my life in one way or another but would never call myself a Welsh speaker. They used to have Welsh programmes piped in by Rediffusion in the morning on the old BBC Home Service and Mam would say something that sounded like "Dumma Uglen Cumree". It must have been "Dyma'r rhaglen Cymru" - here is the Welsh programme. She couldn't speak Welsh and neither could her parents but I suppose even that early exposure allowed me to pick up some of the rhythms of the language. Countless books and courses have followed but with not much success. I must say, it's always been a bit offputting to think that most people you might want to speak Welsh to speak English as well. Once, I had to read some Welsh in public in the Rhondda. "It was very good," they said, "but you had a French accent." All that has changed and all because of flashcards. I found a brilliant flashcard site at www.anki.srs.net and you can download sets of flashcards on loads of topics including Welsh. It gives you twenty new cards a day and feeds you the old ones at different times according to the ease of your answers. I've found it a great way to increase my vocabulary. So, in my piano teaching I've started using flashcards quite a lot recently and intend to include them in my Skype teaching as of tomorrow. After all, if it works for me, it should work for anyone, especially children, with their astonishingly retentive memories.

Help!

A little digression today about a common musical emergency. That great hit song. In this case, Umbrella by Rihanna. You want to play it so you get an easy arrangement from the local music shop. You get it back home and it doesn't sound anything like the record. That was the emergency faced by Jane, one of my piano students today. Boy, did that take me back! When I was a teenager in Abertillery we'd go to Paul's music shop in Somerset Street on a Saturday afternoon and all the latest songs would be displayed in the window of what was essentially quite a small terraced house. Inside, in the front room there was a kind of big table with a board stood up at the back and it was all covered with sheet music. Every surface. It doesn't matter what you wanted to play, Lottie Paul would shuffle out from whatever was through the mysterious doorway to the left of all the clutter and would always be able to find it somehow. For instance, Bryan Ferry brought out a version of These Foolish Things and she found it easily and we came back home with it. In the front room with my "classical piano training" I puzzled it out - it was our second piano by now, a little better than the first one but a full semitone flat. My rendition sounded OK . . . but there was something lacking. Meanwhile, Dylan with his guitar was singing a great version of it. "What are you doing, Dylan? You can't even read music but you can sing the song!" "I'm just playing the guitar chords. See these letters above the music? C . . . F . . . em - that means C major, F major, E minor and so on." It's a big step forward on the piano when you can construct the chords at the keyboard from those letters. Back to Umbrella by Rihanna. Apparently, it took four people to write that, yet it can all be played just on the white notes of the piano with three note chords in the left hand. Essentially, you play the letter name of the chord, call it number one and add three and five up from it. If it doesn't sound quite right, you mess around with the middle note, number three. Emergency sorted! Meanwhile Rihanna is probably saying, "I wish somebody would write me another Umbrella." That's one great thing about music: it's so simple but it can earn you millions of pounds - but only if you get it right.

Why me? Why me?

I've changed my mind. It's a better idea to say a bit about MY LIFE IN MUSIC before I go on to anything else. I was a late starter. I asked my folks for piano lessons when I was nine and they got a beat up piano into the front room at 21 Gladstone Street in Abertillery and sent me up the road to Miss Horler at number 47. Two shillings for a half hour slot. My brother is seven years older than me and he was into biology. He told me it's impossible for the right hand and the left hand to do different things at the same time. It's not; but it is a challenge. I don't think I was that good but that probably helps if you're a teacher because you know what it's like to struggle a bit and YOU CAN SYMPATHISE WITH YOUR STUDENTS. At eleven I started playing the cornet. Hopeless. I couldn't even get a sound out of it for weeks but I did play my first concert on cornet - Cwm's Junior Showtime. That's Cwm in the South Wales Valleys . . . I switched to French horn a year later and it began to click because not many people played horn round there in the seventies and I was in demand. That's when I first began to earn some money from playing in my mid-teens. I eventually made it through to the National Youth Orchestra. My worst choice was to drop music as a subject at school in favour of Latin. Still, that choice made a practical musician out of me. I taught myself the guitar and the recorder. I spent more than a decade in France mainly working with homeless people but came back to Britain in 2002. I met some great musicians called Huw and Catherine who inspired me to write some new songs http://soundcloud.com/frost-at-midnight/ Lots of them have been played on BBC Radio including Radio 2 and Radio 4. At the same time, I began to teach piano a lot - I'd always done bits and pieces - and it just snowballed from that. I decided I needed to have a qualification to get a bit of credibility so put myself through Grade 8. Once again, I SYMPATHISE WITH MY STUDENTS because that was tough. I felt as if my hands had turned into lumps of quivering slime. Yes, kids, I know how you feel when you walk into that exam room !